One of the things I notice every so often, is people who are unable (or unwilling) to setup a linux box to do MUD development, trying to work around in things like cygwin. I hate to see people putting so much effort into trying to make orange juice with apples, so I thought I'd just mention the idea of using VMware Player (which is free) to run an image of a free linux distro, right on your desktop.

I'd probably suggest giving the VM 256M of RAM, 1 CPU, and using bridged ethernet if you can spare an address. You can have it do NAT, or even just private networking with your host PC too, but bridged lets you pretend it really is a full seperate machine.

Anyways, here's a page full of downloadable images. They also link to the free VM player as well.

Hope someone finds it useful. It's better than a poke in the eye… or cygwin. :)

I'd actually suggest using VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org). I only have experience using it in Linux to virtualize Linux and Windows, but my experience with it so far has been excellent. It's easy to set up and use and runs both operating systems flawlessly, with the technical limitation that 3d acceleration isn't supported (but that's a non-issue for MUD servers). I imagine it could probably also run *BSD, too, if that's your preference, but I've never tried it.

I've been using the openSUSE image from the Mono-project website since it comes preloaded with Mono goodness.

Since we're on the topic, though, this does remind me of one issue I had with it. When I ran a MUD on the Image (SourceMUD, in this case) I could not connect to it from outside of the Image, which was annoying because the image didn't come with a telnet client (That I could easily locate) plus I wanted to do some tests on my own client and others, like Mushclient.

I ended up having to download the MudMagic client (As it's the only Linux client I knew of at the time) in order to walk around. Is there a way to bridge the two, was it a Linux firewall issue? Etc.

While I like VirtualBox, I wouldn't recommend it for a new mud adminwho's a novice to unix. The networking is non-trivial to configurefor anything other than a vanilla outbound-only natted setup.Possible, sure. Not super-duper hard. But not as easy as VMware.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Sun and VirtualBox, butfor this particular thing…getting newbs onto a comfortable unix environment for playing around with a network application, I wouldn't recommend it.

Vassi: it could be a number of things, unfortunately it depends a little on how exactly you set up the environment. With bridged networking, your virtual machine will get an IP on the same level that your PC does, which typically means from your router. If you don't have a router, you'll need to use NAT, which means that your PC is basically acting as the router for your VM. In either case, it is fairly easy to connect to the VM from your PC: you get the VM's IP address, and then connect to it. Connecting from outside the PC is harder. To get the VM's IP address, you can launch a terminal and put in "ifconfig". You might get several IP addresses, so just try each of them (unless you know which network interface is the right one – it's not the loopback).

Vassi: it could be a number of things, unfortunately it depends a little on how exactly you set up the environment. With bridged networking, your virtual machine will get an IP on the same level that your PC does, which typically means from your router. If you don't have a router, you'll need to use NAT, which means that your PC is basically acting as the router for your VM. In either case, it is fairly easy to connect to the VM from your PC: you get the VM's IP address, and then connect to it. Connecting from outside the PC is harder. To get the VM's IP address, you can launch a terminal and put in "ifconfig". You might get several IP addresses, so just try each of them (unless you know which network interface is the right one – it's not the loopback).

Obviously i'm weeks removed from the actual incident, but if memory serves it wasn't working quite that way, despite using the IP of the VM rather than the loopback. Maybe i'll fire it up this week and give it another shot - the new Mono VM is out anyway.

This is funny, I've been looking all over for advice on how to do this very thing. I came back from a LINUX conference and just decided to try out ubuntu on my virtualbox. Then the next day I thought learning to build my own little MUSH/MUCK would be a nice timekiller. But I'm confused as ever. I have PennMUSH up and running, but just like someone mentioned, I'm having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to connect to it using MUSHClient. I tried to localhost, port 4201, but I'm thinking its a way more complicated than that.

Before changing to andlinux i use vmware and my own install of suse, it worked great. I always found being stuck with the whole desktop in a window somewhat limiting to my workflow. But it works, and it works well and is a much better proposition compared to cygwin.

I don't install a desktop at all… I just do a server install with a text console, install openssh-server, and then just ssh into the VM from putty.

But, I'm not a GUI person, so that works for me. :)

Yeah, i can see the benefit for you to be working that way. Im a gui sort of person and coding without Kdevelop or Eclipse would be a nightmare to someone like me. It all comes down to work flow and what works best for you and how comfortable you are working that way. I have friends who are happy working in vi and emacs respectively, the thought of that makes me shudder.

One other advantage I just realized…. since my VM is running on my windows box, whose main purpose it to let me play games… I get to compile with a 3GHz P4, instead of the 900MHz P3 that is my real linux box. :)

One other advantage I just realized…. since my VM is running on my windows box, whose main purpose it to let me play games… I get to compile with a 3GHz P4, instead of the 900MHz P3 that is my real linux box. :)

That's why I have one 3.6GHz with 4GB of RAM that I dual-boot… I get to have the nice specs in both worlds. :wink:-